Contact Tracing With District-Based Trajectories

Abstract

Identifying the places an infected person has visited during a virus incubation time in order to conduct contact tracing is currently done using manual interviews since proximity-based contact tracing methods do not store geolocation information due to privacy concerns. During the incubation time, an infected person might visit several locations and either forget where they went or are reluctant to disclose their trip details. To minimize manual location tracing while preserving the user's privacy, the authors propose a mesh block sequence method where the trajectories are transformed into a mesh block sequence before being shared with health authorities. These simulations show that this a useful method by which to protect user privacy by concealing specific details related to a trajectory. While this simulation uses an Australian administrative region structure, this method is applicable in countries which implement similar administrative hierarchical building blocks.